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Seeking to ignite a love of discovery and technology in learners right from the start, a team at The University of Texas at Austin has launched a new resource to help families, schools and youth connect to the university's offerings in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) that are especially for children, teens and their teachers.

Guillermo Lezama is a physics major at UT Austin. For First-Generation College Celebration Week this week at UT Austin, Amanda Figueroa-Nieves spoke with the senior about his experiences in UTeach, the university's STEM teacher training program.

UTeach Executive Director and physics professor Michael Marder has been selected as the recipient of The University of Texas at Austin's 2020 Civitatis Award.

With Texas' governor among those declaring that K-12 schools will remain closed through the end of the school year, many families and teachers are looking for resources to support learning from home. Several outreach programs in the College of Natural Sciences and at UT Austin support STEM learning from afar. Here are a few to check out.

UTeach, a nationally replicated model program with roots in The University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences, has announced $5.6 million in new federal funding to support its work to train teachers in effective computer science education, especially in schools that have been underserved. 

A new initiative from the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin aims to drastically improve students' college readiness and success in mathematics. The new initiative, called Launch Years, looks to align K-12 schools and higher education and is supported by a $6.68 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Each year, the American Junior Academy of Science invites the nation's top pre-college researchers to tour a premiere university's campus and meet with the people there who are doing cutting-edge research in scientific labs every day. This year, dozens of high-school scientists-in-training took their tours at The University of Texas at Austin, where they met researchers different from whom they might have expected.

Here, many of the pioneering researchers are only a year or two out of high school themselves. 

When Samantha Pliego started her freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin in the College of Natural Sciences, things went well. Mostly.

"I did struggle in that first biology class," said Pliego, who is now a sophomore.

The STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math – have real work to do in terms of diversity. Right now, women make up only about 30 percent of the STEM workforce – and people identifying as black or Hispanic make up just 11 percent.

Amid the national debate about the lack of women in science, experts often cite the need for more female role models to inspire a new generation. Today, there are signs that the public face of science is changing. In Austin, among the vanguard are young women scientists.